Louis Brandeis as a Harvard Law Student
Louis D. Brandeis needs no introduction. Known in Boston as “the peoples’ attorney” and to his colleagues as “the lawyers’ lawyer”, Brandeis was nothing short of a legal phenomenon. Appointed to the US Supreme Court by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916, his legacy left an indelible mark on American jurisprudence. His excellent biography by Melvin Urofsky, which inspired me to write this post and from which I draw on below, is highly recommended.
Before becoming the Brandeis we all now know, Louis Dembitz Brandeis studied law at Harvard. To understand his life as a student, we must first examine the philosophy of another brilliant legal scholar, Professor Christopher Langdell.
Langdell was the Dean of Harvard Law School when Brandeis arrived at Cambridge, Massachusetts. His greatest innovation was the introduction of the “case method” of instruction at law school, a method that was then deemed rather revolutionary but is now widely accepted as the standard method of teaching in US law schools. In a nutshell, this method does not demand the sheer memorisation of legal rules formulated in the abstract. On the contrary, it revolves around law students carefully examining and digesting the original authorities (cases and judicial opinions) and deriving for themselves the principles of the law.
According to Langdell, ‘law, considered as a science, consists of certain principles or doctrines. To have such a mastery of these as to be able to apply them with constant facility and certainty to the ever-tangled skein of human affairs, is what constitutes a true lawyer; and hence to acquire that mastery should be the business of every earnest student of law’.
Rote recitation of facts and judicial dicta were not his cup of tea; he rather preferred a socratic dialogue between the professor and his students, who should be colleagues in the search for academic rigour.
Brandeis took to this method like a duck to water. Writing to his brother-in-law Otto Wehle, he enthusiastically remarked that law schools “are splendid institutions” as regards the opportunity for learning. On another occasion, he praised the Langdellian method of instruction, asserting that ‘no instructor can provide the royal road to knowledge by giving to the student the conclusions’. The role of a law professor is to show his students ‘how to think in a legal manner in accordance with the principles of the particular branch of the law’. When a law student learns the law in this fashion, the key legal principles are etched on her mind ‘as they never could be by mere reading or lectures; for instead of being presented as desiccated facts, they occur as an integral part of the drama of life’.
It would be an understatement to remark that Brandeis was an excellent law student. The facts speak for themselves. Before even turning twenty-one, he graduated as valedictorian, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and achieved the highest grade point average in the history of the school, a record that would not be surpassed in his lifetime. The groundwork for an impressive and inspirational legal career had been laid in the libraries and lecture halls of Harvard, where his legal reasoning skills where moulded and sharpened.
